Alan Jacobs

Religious ideas are usually said to be an argument against what is called “relativism,” or the idea that nothing in particular should be regarded as absolutely important. In one respect, though, the ideas that Havel liked to entertain did promote a kind of relativism, and this was in regard to his own life. If you think there is something more, a Being or transcendental something-or-other that goes beyond your own material existence, your own life is bound to end up seeming, by way of comparison, humbler, therefore easier to put at risk. Havel seems to have understood pretty clearly that his own life was not the greatest of all possible values. In 1983, when they carried him off in handcuffs to the prison hospital because he had refused to request a pardon—at that particular moment his lungs had trouble breathing but his brain seems to have had no trouble recognizing that his own continued place on earth was not his highest goal. If he had come to a different recognition, would the rest of his life have spoken to us as eloquently as it does? He was one of the greatest and most heroic figures of modern times, or maybe of all time, but he was a great and heroic figure because his own thinking gave him the courage to risk not being anything at all.

janmorris:

“Ai, ai, ai”

Several times during my stay in Rome I came across a couple of countrymen who seemed, in their quaint fustian clothes and peculiar shoes, to have stepped more or less out of the Middle Ages. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. The medieval figures seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factness of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner, “Ai, ai, ai,” they said theatrically, like Italians in old movies.

‘Listen,’ said Bernie Krause. He rolled down his car window, and we sat silently for a moment. It was an hour before dawn, still dark and foggy in the Mayacamas Mountains, a northern California coastal range. But somewhere in the distance, a bird was calling—a high, bright, lively song that seemed at odds with the misty gloom. 'A song sparrow,’ Krause whispered. 'They’re always the first to sing here.’ The sparrow’s opening notes meant that this day’s dawn chorus had begun. Wherever wild birds live, mornings start this way, with males ascending to their perches to sing and welcome the day. 'The dawn chorus is one of the earth’s best and oldest songs,’ Krause said, grabbing his recording equipment and tripod. 'But most of us in the industrialized world have never heard it. And it’s disappearing.’

Craig Thompson on the making of Habibi

When I’m at the computer I feel as if I’m plugged straight into the story, instead of having to telegraph it in from somewhere else. I don’t write well using longhand any more, because it makes my hands work too hard (I have Dupuytren’s Contracture, and I’m much happier typing nowadays). I write in Word, using the Perpetua font. When I edit, I always do it on screen (although at that point I change the font to Times Roman – changing fonts helps me spot things I’ve missed). For some reason I’m very sensitive to fonts. I like Perpetua because it’s clear, not too angular and looks friendly without being annoyingly jokey or cool. Also it doesn’t have a colour or a smell. (To me, some fonts have smells or colours, which can be distracting).

If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment. Mine occurred in May 2010, in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Marina Abramović exhibition “The Artist Is Present.” I was fascinated, but not by the particulars of her performance art, although they were interesting enough. Her manner of sitting utterly still for hours and staring at one volunteer after another positioned a few feet across from her compelled the attention of the crowd, as did the naked (and often jarringly beautiful), immobilized, blank-faced models and dancers who were also part of the exhibition.

What made me think of DeLillo at MoMA was not the art, however, but the spectators. They were all transfixed. They stared at Abramović and her collaborators as if the performers’ trance states were contagious. A kind of communal hypnosis seemed to be at work. I had never seen anything like it. On the day I was there, the usually noisy galleries had settled down into a low murmur, though I did hear nervous laughter coming from unhip oldsters. An intriguing collective project was going on, but no one seemed to know exactly what it was. I half-expected to spot DeLillo somewhere in the crowd, patiently watching the spectators who were watching the immobilized performers who, like pretty narcissists, were staring off into space at nothing. You could glance at anything, but your glance would never be acknowledged by anybody. Something importantly autistic was in the air.

In a companion survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Twitter users, the Portland-Tweetminster team found that the vast majority of those users — roughly 80 percent — use the service primarily for communicating with friends. But, fascinatingly, 68 percent of those polled said they also use Twitter to monitor the news, making Twitter a potentially effective, if still nascent, way to circumvent African nations’ generally highly restricted media institutions. And more than a quarter of the survey respondents said they use Twitter to keep track of job opportunities.

Also worth noting: Just over half — 57 percent — of tweets, the analysis found, are sent from mobile devices. Which is actually a surprisingly low number, considering that, per a recent report, 433 million people in Africa — 53 percent of the overall population — currently have a mobile cellular subscription, while only 1 million (0.2 percent) subscribe to fixed broadband.

The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of young Europeans. I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate…. When I proposed at a meeting of EU mayors the idea of also introducing Erasmus for craftsmen and professionals, a Welsh mayor said: ‘My citizens would never accept this!’ And when I spoke about this a few days ago on English television, I was slapped down by the anchorman, who was worried about the euro crisis, about a supranational Europe and about the technical governments of Papademos in Greece and Monti in Italy who were not 'elected’, and are therefore 'undemocratic’….

Back when Pope Wojtyla was still alive, there was much discussion on whether they should accept the European constitution and the continent’s Christian roots. Secular people predominated and they did nothing about it. The church protested. There was however a third way, more difficult, but one that would give us strength today.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them. That is precisely how I see its future.

Desperate for help [with his failing vision], Huxley was persuaded to pursue the Bates Method, a controversial theory (now largely debunked) suggesting, among other things, that glasses shouldn’t be worn, natural sunlight could be beneficial and a series of exercises and techniques could help improve vision. He claimed impressive results: ‘Within a couple of months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain and fatigue … At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles.’

That quote comes from The Art Of Seeing, the book he published about his experiences with The Bates Method in 1942. Reviews, were mixed at best. The British Medical Journal review declared: ‘For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley’s antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Couéism. To these the book may be of value. It is hardly possible that it will impress anyone endowed with common sense and a critical faculty.’

In the same article the author suggested that Huxley’s vision may actually have improved naturally with time as some conditions move in cycles. Others, meanwhile, doubted that he could see much at all. Wikipedia cites a Saturday Review column from Bennett Cerf published in 1952, just two years before The Doors Of Perception, describes Huxley speaking at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and seemingly reading from his notes with ease: ‘Then suddenly he faltered — and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn’t reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn’t read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment.’

Why are creative people so deeply sceptical of Britain’s honours system? Previously top secret details revealed today show that artists including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and LS Lowry rejected honours from the Queen as well as such writers as Roald Dahl and Graham Greene. What made them so reluctant to be rewarded by the British establishment? None of these artists were known radicals. They were not on record as being republicans – although Francis Bacon is said to have once booed Princess Margaret when she insisted on singing at a party. Simple politics cannot be the explanation. It must be something harder to pin down, something in the nature of OBEs and knighthoods and the rest.